William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

Radnor’s shriek cut through the earphones in the B-52. Moreau jerked to attention. Kazakhs lost his thoughts of Sarah Jean. Halupalai sat bolt upright, startled out of the farewell to the fifteen-year-old daughter he had not seen for years.

Downstairs, Radnor’s fist smashed into the worktable in front of Tyler, blood from his own hand spattering across the navigation charts. Tyler reared back in his seat and sat frozen, tears streaming down his face. “I spanked him, Radnor.” Radnor picked up his hand and slammed it down again. And again. He felt nothing. Out of the comer of his eye, in the unwanted peripheral vision of Tyler’s broader screen, he saw the first white intrusion. Then the second, and a third creeping forward. He fixed his eyes on the screen, then relaxed his hand until the bloody pencil released on the console in front of Tyler. Radnor pulled back to his own position. “Incognitos,” he said calmly into the all-channels radio. “Incognitos at twelve o’clock.”

The admiral’s brow furrowed. He clutched the white phone tightly to his jaw and stared intently past the successor. “Forty miles?” he repeated. “Then thirty-six?” He frowned. “No buckshot pattern? Smart little bugger, isn’t he? Thirty-one. Twenty-four. Crap.” Harpoon let the phone edge imperceptibly down his chin and brought his eyes into hard focus on the successor. “Sir, would you fasten your belt, place your head in your lap, and brace yourself?”

The man stared back at Harpoon blankly. The admiral’s eyes moved away again.

“Dancing ’em up our tailpipe, huh?” His eyes twitched slightly in thought, his mind taking him deep beneath the sea into a more familiar world. The old submariner saw depth-charge patterns. “At what intervals? Crap. Do we know if it’s a Yankee-class boat?” He listened. “It better be. Yeah, they’ve got sixteen tubes. No, with multiple warheads he’d crisscross us.” He knew the Soviet submarine captain would fire from all his missile tubes. The heat from one launch set off enemy detectors as surely as the heat from sixteen. You didn’t hold back in this kind of war. If you did, you sank with unused missiles. “Nineteen miles? Dud? Mr. President, get your head down!”

The successor looked totally confused. This was not part of the game plan—move quickly, act decisively. What the devil was going on?

“We can figure on two, maybe three duds in the sixteen.” Pause. “You got me there, pal. It’s Russian goddamn roulette. Fourteen miles?” The admiral’s free hand pulled at his open collar. He tried to calculate the pattern marching on them—a string of detonations, probably sixty miles long, cutting slightly diagonally right to left across their takeoff route.

“Mr. President. Please. Do you realize what is happening? A Soviet submarine has launched missiles at us. They are patterned to cross our route. Exploding every fifteen seconds. Do you understand?”

The successor’s eyes narrowed warily. He seemed frozen.

“Dammit!” the admiral erupted. “Get your fucking head down!” He reached over and shoved the man’s head down to his knees. “Ten miles?” he repeated into the phone. “Port side, aft?” he asked, slipping into more comfortable lingo. He started to order hard right rudder. “Get those damned guards down! Propped up against the bulkheads! Hands off weapons!” The successor glanced indecisively upward at the agents. They looked at each other and began to move.

“Seven miles,” Harpoon whispered into the phone. Then he barked: “Hard right! Full power, hard right!”

Suddenly, the presidential compartment turned on its side. The admiral quickly lowered his head into his lap. He felt a weight slam into the back of his seat, a body tumble over his back. Next to him he heard a thud, a whoosh of air, and a muffled chugga-chugga-chugga. He shuddered, but he was counting. Three… four… Someone screamed. Five… six… He felt the first ripple, like a sudden squall at sea, and the plane lurched up, then down, metal groaning. He braced himself and waited for the next. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. Metal ground against metal as the pilot struggled to level out. Twenty. Twenty-five. Without raising his head, the admiral reached for the loose telephone receiver. “What gives?” He slowly pulled himself upright, eyes closed in relief. “I’ll be damned.” Then he said, “Take her all the way up.”

Harpoon sighed. As if to himself, he said, “We got the empty chamber.” For a moment he was oblivious to his immediate surroundings, the tension oozing out as he tried to absorb just how lucky they had been. They had survived a dozen rounds—World War Three rounds at just under a megaton each. Then the awful other reality struck him, the low, undulating airport moan echoing in his memory. Baton Rouge had just paid an incredible price for tonight’s strange and unheralded presidential visit.

Harpoon opened his eyes slowly. Across from him an unconscious agent, apparently the one who had tumbled over his seat, lay limp over the successor’s knees. At Harpoon’s side, the judge still slumped forward in the crash position. The new blue fabric of his swivel chair was shredded, white stuffing edging out of three small craters. The seat padding, absorbing some of the impact of the bullets, had saved the aircraft from a perhaps-fatal skin-piercing decompression. The padding had not saved the judge. The back of his shirt was red. The Bible had skittered just out of reach of a hand that dangled loosely to the carpeted floor. Behind the judge’s chair, the other agent rose shakily from his knees, staring numbly at the machine gun he had jammed into the back of the seat as he fell.

Harpoon felt ill. Being a submariner himself, he doubted the Soviet commander had fired on direct orders from Moscow. The poor bugger must have been cornered, an American sub on his tail. The orders had come out of sealed contingency plans written years ago in some Soviet think tank, just as similar contingent plans had been created by bright young Americans in the sterile offices of the Rand Corporation and the gingerbread rooms of the Hudson Institute. Harpoon’s mind drifted to his last undersea command and the sailing orders he had carried. Don’t sink with the nukes. Cornered? Fire. At any available target.

Harpoon finally looked at the successor and saw dumbfounded shock and horror. Damn. He wanted the man scared, but not this way. Leaders were not supposed to see blood. It made them erratic and irrational, stalling some, drawing a need for vengeance out of others. Computer dots representing neutered millions were much safer. The innocent-looking dots insulated the mind. Harpoon shuddered. He had a helluva sales job ahead of him.

“Incognitos like hell,” Kazaklis snapped. “Not up here. Them’s bandits.” He adjusted his helmet. “Distance,” he demanded. “Velocity.”

“Hundred miles,” Radnor snapped back. “Fast. Mach two-plus. Darned near Mach three.”

“No, no. Check again.” The pilot’s voice sounded dubious, not alarmed.

“Affirmative. Eighteen hundred miles an hour. Three, correction, four bandits.”

“Battle stations!” Kazakhs ordered. “Helmets! Oxygen! Defense!” He did not wait for responses. “Jamming! Chaff! Shovel that stuff like hay, gunner. Decoys ready?”

Kazakhs glanced quickly at his copilot. “Honored?”

“They cared enough to send the very best,” Moreau responded, snapping her oxygen mask.

“Too good. Too fast for an old bucket of bolts like us. MIG-25 Foxbats. They must be very hungry. And suicidal. No way those gas-guzzlers can get back home.”

“Makes ’em meaner.”

“Meaner than us? You got hemlock in your canteen, too, pal. This is the joust of the kamikazes.”

In the softened lights of the corporate-bland and distractingly spotless briefing compartment, three computerized maps glowed on the wall behind Harpoon’s chiseled features. One showed the United States, another the Soviet Union, and a third displayed, in Mercator map distortion, the world. The vibration of the aircraft, and the tiny imperfections of the computer’s microdot drawings, caused small but mind-bending warps in such familiar outlines as the Florida spit and the Puget Sound cut. Less familiar outcroppings and indentations such as Kamchatka and the Black Sea also wobbled slightly out of tune with reality. But the Mercator distortion, that mapmaker’s deformity that enlarged the northernmost parts of the world by creating a squared globe, was the greatest. The landmass of Asia seemed to overwhelm the rest of the world. The successor saw that first.